Thoughts on literature and myth

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Last Saturday, we had our monthly book club meeting where one member quoted from a book of local farmer lore: about how the earth was not farmed for a certain period of time when it was considered to be menstruating! I immediately remembered a piece of lore of the Kerala fisher-folk I had heard years back.

In Kerala, we have Saturday something called “chaakara”, when fish come to the surface in great numbers and the fishermen have a fine time just scooping up the fish in large numbers. The interesting thing is that for some days before this, the sea turns red: and the fishermen don’t venture out. Kadalamma (“Mother Sea”) is supposed to be having her periods.

What we are seeing here is a variant of the almost universal mythical theme of equating nature – prakruthi – with Woman. And since myth is almost always written by men, the woman becomes the passive object – the “eternal feminine”. Before we go into the politics of this, however, I would like to look at this concept in a bit more detail.

The Myth of Ahalya

The Samkhya Philosophy posits the evolution of the universe, and its continued existence, on the interaction of the active principle (purusha – “male”) with passive principle (prakruthi – “nature”). (A week ago, I witnessed a play by a group from Pondicherry based on this theme, composed entirely of scenes of male-female fusion – some of them violent – without any dialogue. It seems that this concept still holds sway even among progressives.) In the Vedic religion, the woman is continuously referred to as the “field” and the man as the “sower”. And reading a book on the knightly quest for the Holy Grail by Joseph Campbell, I find this:

Because of the tendency to anthropomorphize—a tendency characteristic of ignorant peoples—the feminine earth notion takes definite form, finally, of a goddess, and the masculine fertilizing principle takes shape in a vigorous god. The union of god and goddess, it is thought, results in the abundant fertility of nature.

I immediately thought of Indra – the rain deity of the early Aryans who held sway in the Vedic religion before the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva took over – who is indeed a vigorous (and oversexed) god like the Greek Zeus. Indra used to run after women, rather in the vein of Zeus: and in the context of the current topic, the myth of Ahalya is instructive.

Ahalya being released from her curse – painting by Raja Ravi Varma

Ahalya was the wife of the sage Gautama, who was desired by Indra. Once when the sage went out, Indra assumed his form and seduced her. Gautama came to know of this deceit, and cursed Ahalya into a stone (and according to one version I heard, cursed Indra with a thousand penises – however, these have been sanitised into eyes subsequently). Ahalya was imprisoned her rock form until Rama came and set her free, in Treta Yuga.

One analysis of the myth is provided by Prof. Leelavati in the introduction a book about the “Pancha Kanyas”, the five distinguished women of Indian myth. She sees Ahalya as the untilled field (A – Halya: “not-ploughed”) and Gautama as the sun (Gau – Tama: “earth-warmer”): Indra, as rain, fertilises it. So shorn of all moralistic preaching, this could be a very ancient myth of a people, slowly moving into an agrarian mode of life from one of hunting and gathering. The act of seduction here is thus desirable, as it is what produces life. (Maybe, after Indra fell from grace with the advent of the Trinity, the roles were reversed and he was cast as villain. But note that the sun turns the untilled field into rock – a symbol for barrenness – until Rama, the hero from the Sun Dynasty, comes and changes her back into her fertile form, as one of the tasks in his Hero’s Journey.)

The Earth Mother

The earth in her feminine form is also mother and goddess (Bhumi). Rama’s consort Sita is not born from a human womb but a furrow in the field, as her father, King Janaka (“creator”), ploughs it. A rather odd occupation for a king, unless we see him as a version of the grain king: the dying and reviving god who is synonymous with the harvest (the myth of Maveli in Kerala is another version). Here, however, instead of the king, it is his daughter who symbolises the grain – and at the end of the epic Ramayana, Sita, spurned by Rama, calls upon her mother and is swallowed by the earth.

Sita swallowed up by the Earth – painting by Raja Ravi Varma

The two wives of Vishnu, the God who sleeps on the thousand-header cosmic snake and dreams up the whole of human existence has his head in the lap of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Prosperity and his feet in the lap of Bhumi, the Earth Goddess.

Pupul Jayakar in her book The Earth Mother has compiled different variants of this archetype from across many primitive cultures in India.

All these have convinced me that the concept of nature as feminine predates the patriarchal culture. What has changed as man took over the reins of society was how the feminine was viewed. Instead of a bountiful mother, sometimes nurturing and sometimes punishing but always protective, she became a passive field: a place for the male to “sow his seed” and reap the harvest. The holy mystery of menstruation became a sort of social taboo (as seen in its most virulent form in the recent Sabarimala agitation). Man was in the job of “husbanding” the environment, not being part of it.

Seeing nature as feminine need not be related to the objectification of women. It could be with a feeling of reverence, as women were revered in primitive societies as the people who were responsible for the continuance of the race. The worship of earth (and as an extension of it, nature) may be just what the doctor ordered in these days of rampant and suicidal environmental destruction.

Samudra Vasane Devi, Paravata Stana Mandale;

Vishnu-patnim Namastubhyam Paada Sparsham Kshamasva Me…

(O Goddess! Having the ocean as Her garments and mountains as Her breasts, who is the consort of Lord Vishnu, I bow to You; please forgive me for touching You with my feet.)

It was a year of exceptionally heavy and eminently satisfactory reading, when even the books I one-starred served a purpose.

Non-Fiction

The year was almost equally split between fiction and non-fiction, with fiction having the slight edge. Of the non-fiction ones, the outstanding reads were Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, a history book which actually looks at the whys and not only the hows; and Being Reshma, the horrifying yet uplifting memoir of an acid attack survivor. Another book which repays attention is by another brave girl, Payel Bhattacharya, who is fighting a desperate battle against VHL syndrome, a rare and life-threatening genetic disease. Her book, The warrior princess, is not exactly award material: but she definitely is. I know her personally, and her pluck.

India is slowly sliding into fascism, in a classical example of the “boiled frog” syndrome. To understand this drift towards the right, I read a lot of books from various genres: politics, history and reportage. These being from the whole range of the political spectrum, there were some I abhorred, the explicity right-wing ones: but I had to bite the bullet and forge ahead, as they were required reading to obtain a first-hand peek into the brain of the Hindu right-wingers.

The most famous (and IMO, the most poisonous) among them is V.D. Savarkar, whose book Hindutva is the core of the philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s answer to the Nazi party. This year, I read his even more obnoxious Six glorious epochs of Indian history, in which he advocates the ethnic cleansing of Muslim men and the wholesale enslavement of Muslim women. This sentiment of “de-Islamising” India is echoed by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who was the second supremo of the RSS, in his book We Or Our Nationhood Defined.

Savarkar’s disciple and friend, Nathuram Godse, murdered Gandhi in 1948. His justification for doing so is set out in his deposition before the court, finally declassified: I read that too, to understand the spread of the right-wing cancer into the Indian psyche. (There are still people in India who consider Godse a hero. Need I say more?). Interestingly, Savarkar was implicated in the Gandhi murder and just escaped by the skin of his teeth: the history of which is set forth in Savarkar and Hindutva ; The Godse Connection by A.G. Noorani.

Fascism has deep roots in the falsification of history. The creation of a fictitious super race or a mythical homeland is part and parcel of all fascist philosophies and Hindutva is no different: but here, the country already exists and they only have to imagine a “golden past”, dismissing all mainline historical research and filling the vacuum with their kooky mix of mythology and legend. Such an exercise is Rajiv Malhotra’s Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines, where this guy with a right-wing agenda and no background in history tries to overturn widely accepted theories of Indian history – viz. the migration of Aryans into the subcontinent. He even denies that the Dravidian language exists! The ignoramus has no valid arguments, other than it’s all a conspiracy theory by “leftist historians”.

The prime accused is, of course, Romila Thapar, whose left-of-centre views seem to irk these bigots. Her book The Past As Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History is the perfect antidote to idiots such as Malhotra; her erudition and balanced voice as she analyses how the present is affected by the past makes it clear why the right wants to rewrite Indian history at all costs. The same theme is explored further in On Nationalism, of which she is one of the contributors: about how a false national identity based on a “Hindu” past is created.

Did I mention conspiracy theories? Well, the one to end all of them that is currently the rage in India is the one about “Urban Naxals” – a sort of “deep state” akin to the one imagined in the USA in the McCarthy era. Urban Naxals, written by the right-wing filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, is responsible for creating this tag which has been taken up enthusiastically by the powers that be. These are incidentally imagined left-wing “moles”, hidden among the intelligentsia, who support the Maoist subversives in India’s so-called Red Corridor. Agnihotri’s book is a classic case of right-wing paranoia, short on facts and long on insinuations – yet dangerous all the same. I could see McCarthy’s ghost being revived in India, especially after I read the pamphlet The Time of the Toad by Dalton Trumbo, one of the famous Hollywood Ten. (BTW, anyone interested in Maoists in India should read Hello, Bastar – The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement by the award-winning journalist Rahul Pandita – another excellent read from the year under review.)

I love to read the views of non-Hindus on Hinduism: Wendy Doniger’s On Hinduism was an interesting read. This lady is roundly reviled by the Hindu right, but there is nothing in her views that denigrate the religion: it just does not conform to their idea of a fictitious monolithic faith, that’s all. Similarly, Prof. D. N. Jha’s book, The Myth of the Holy Cow had also invited the wrath of the Hindutva gang because he tears apart the lie that the cow has always been a sacred animal to Hindus: with textual and archaeological evidence, he proves that the Vedic Indians positively revelled in cow meat. It is a wonder that the author survived, because so many rationalists who tried to cleanse the Indian psyche such as Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh were murdered by Hindu right-wingers. I read one book by Pansare, Who was Shivaji about the great Maratha leader Shivaji, where he argues that contrary to popular belief, Shivaji was really a people’s ruler and not “protector of cows and Brahmins”.

As part of my decision to explore Indian culture, I started my Sanskrit reading project last year. I read through the Manusmriti and the Bhagavad Gita in the original. Manusmriti is a toxic document, patriarchal and racist; the Bhagavad Gita contains some great mythic imagery, but it also is tainted with caste and gender prejudice. I have blogged my reviews of both the texts (here and here).

I would like to call this the year of reading the classics. I decided to stop buying books temporarily and finish off the ones languishing on my shelves – and it paid rich dividends.

Most definitely, the top fiction read of the year was All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It reminds one that book doesn’t have to be fat and full of dense prose to be profound. This slim volume hits like a sledgehammer: the futility of war is laid out in spare and even humorous prose. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich also had the same effect, but to a lesser degree.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill is all it’s hyped up to be. Frightening and literary at the same time, this horror story will stay with one a long time after one closes the book.

Another book which blew me away, with its mixture of humour and pathos, is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday. I read it without any expectations, and was pulled into the tale. A hilarious look at the cockeyed world of projects in the Middle East, carried out with only political intent and no thought of scientific feasibility.

Once one gets past the opaqueness of impressionist writing, one can swim with the tide and enjoy it. This fact was proven to me once again by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a true classic.

Angela Carter got me again with Nights at the Circus. Such a magnificent writer! Sadly, she passed away too soon…

Lolita! Read it finally… the book is well-written, and the prose is extremely powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to wholeheartedly ‘like’ it – because the subject matter was so repugnant.

Also, finally managed to climb all the way to The Castle, after a few aborted attempts, unlike Franz Kafka’s protagonist. Disturbing and frustrating, he may be – but Kafka is certainly compelling.

And I must not forget to mention Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the idol of my youth, still the most magical writer I have ever read.

The big disappointment of the year was The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy. It seems years of writing only political essays have blunted her pen. This book read like a political essay disguised as a novel.

Coming to genre fiction:

Whodunits

Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashimo and Original Sin by P. D. James: both passably good mysteries but not mind-bending. The authors have written better ones.

SF and Fantasy

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, my first experience of SF by a non-European author, was a qualified success: strong on science, a trifle weak on fiction.